The most extravagant Chinese New Year menus in the US: macarons, cordyceps and an 8lb crab
- Chinese New Year in America is celebrated with excess and extravagance – a US$750 Alaskan king crab with truffle sauce, anyone?
- One restaurant group replaced fortune cookies with macarons, the fortunes written by celebrities such as Candace Bushnell, Will Self and Willie Young
Five hundred lanterns. More than a mile of twinkling red lights. Thousands of willow branches. And 1,000 paper pigs adorning the place. The Temple House, a luxury hotel in Chengdu, China, has put in hundreds of hours of labour for Lunar New Year, an indication of the effort hospitality organisations devote to the holiday – and the returns they stand to gain.
Tuesday, February 5, will kick off the Lunar New Year holiday – also known as the Chinese New Year – marking the transition from the Year of the Dog to the Year of the Pig.
During the holiday, hotels and restaurants worldwide mark the period with opulent decorations and decadent meals, all laden with symbolism, invariably for health and wealth. The price tag for Chinese consumers last year, including sales at restaurants and shopping malls, was US$146 billion, according to Bloomberg.
“Chinese New Year is the Temple House’s top performing week of the year,” says Kurt Macher, the hotel’s general manager. “We are expecting to grow these [2018] numbers this year, with an increase of around 8 per cent to 10 per cent.”
Those numbers exceed overall projections made by Ctrip, China’s largest online travel agency, for Chinese New Year. “Chinese people are expected to spend more than US$74.2 billion on domestic tourism during the holiday this year,” a slightly more than 5 per cent jump over last year’s US$70.5 billion, and an estimate that doesn’t factor in retail sales.
Mandarin Oriental properties in Washington, Miami, and Boston have deployed Rolls-Royce’s first SUV, the Cullinan, in lucky red for guests to celebrate the holiday.